This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Deborah Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.

This month we're going to hear, I Live on Your Visits by Dorothy Parker,

which was published in the New Yorker in January of 1955.

For the past week up at his school he had hoped,

and coming down in the train he had hoped so hard that it became prayer

that his mother would not be what he thought of only as like that.

The story was chosen by Andrew Sean Greer,

who's the author of six books of fiction,

and received the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for his novel Less.

Hi Andy.

Hi there.

So tell me why Dorothy Parker?

What does she mean to you as a reader and as a writer?

I got a copy of the portable Dorothy Parker when I was 17, friend gave it to me,

and it has been my Bible efforts.

I never read anything so wicked and funny before.

What prompted the friend to give you that?

I think she was shocked that I'd never heard of Dorothy Parker.

There probably aren't that many 17-year-olds these days who have.

Well she'd had a different kind of boarding school life where they passed that kind of thing around.

...